Move Like a Cheetah with this Incredible Human Powered Vehicle [Photos]

Is it a tricycle? Is it a weird bike? It's neither. Called Pardo, as an abbreviation of the word guepardo (which is cheetah in Spanish), this human powered vehicle seeks to imitate the movement and feeling of the animal. See how it works and more pics in the extended.Pardo was designed by Pablo Lopez from the firm DIBRUTAL Industrial Design for Innovar, a national innovations contest held in Argentina annually (from which we also talked about the Green Houses project).

The vehicle is run through two pedals on the lower part, which the user pushes down with its feet, making the vehicle go forward. The pedals and mechanism are shown in the images below.

For your convenience, it also folds!

Why a cheetah? Says the designer: "Parting with the fascination us human beings have with nature and our eagerness for imitating it, I began to study the cheetah and its habits during hunt. From then on I wanted to know what the cheetah feels on the hunt process and wanted to try to transmit that through my design."

"My main goal is transmitting and creating sensations," ads Lopez.

The vehicle is not just an idea. A prototype was created and presented at the before mentioned exhibition, and tested on racing tracks. Take a look at the photos below.

As you may have noticed, Pardo is not an urban vehicle thought to use in the street. So far, Lopez thought of it as a sort of extreme sport.

Though, given the right traffic conditions, who knows if this could be the high speed version of bikes?

For more on the vehicle, write to the designer to dibrutal at gmail dot com.

Move Like a Cheetah with this Incredible Human Powered Vehicle [Photos]

Is it a tricycle? Is it a weird bike? It's neither. Called Pardo, as an abbreviation of the word guepardo (which is cheetah in Spanish), this human powered vehicle seeks to imitate the movement and feeling of the animal. See how it works and more pics